Those Big Yellow Buses

I am pretty sure the last time I was on a school bus was in the early summer of 1981. I rode home from the last day of 6th grade, proud of the fact that I'd been chosen to be a Patrol for the following year. (We got to wear the bright orange belt/strap that signaled Safety, and help the little kids across the street at the crosswalks, keep them from running in the halls, see them onto the buses. A select pair also got to raise and lower the flag outside the school every day, and generally feel all manner of Important.) Iwas a little crushed that after being selected for this honor, and training for several weeks, and feeling the glory that was properly reverent folding of the American flag with my Patrol partner (make a tidy triangle; tuck the end in; do NOT let even a corner of it touch the ground!), my mother was getting remarried, and we were moving, and I was not actually going to get to spend my 7th grade year wearing a highly-coveted Patrol badge.

What I did not feel, that warm June day, was any nostalgia for riding the bus. It didn't occur to me that I would never ride a school bus again, even though in our new neighborhood, we would be walking the mile to school every day. It didn't occur to me that there was anything romantic, interesting, or miss-able about school buses.

Frankly, that thought probably never occurred to me in my whole life.

Until yesterday morning.

I rode a school bus again as part of Son's Kindergarten orientation. And here's what struck me first as I mounted those deep steps and turned left to head down the aisle: school buses smell exactly the same as they did nearly 30 years ago.* E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. As I was inhaling sharply and exclaiming over the fact, the woman behind me was also saying with surprise, "It smells just the same!" We could hardly get over it. The high-backed green seats, covered in that finely-lined faux leather -- just the same! The oddly-shaped windows with corners adorned by those hard square metal buttons that you push towards the center, simultaneously, in order to lower or raise the safety glass -- just the same! The impossibly narrow aisle -- just the same! The lack of legroom -- just the same!

The only thing that was different, as one parent noted, was that no one was rushing to fill the back seats first. But that, of course, was because we parents were too mature for that sort of thing, and all the children on-board were prospective Kindergarteners who didn't know the desirability of those rear seats, and who were seriously and intently following all the directions of Mr. Kevin, the bus driver, who was initiating them into the mysteries and safety precautions of School Bus Riding.

There is a whole post to be had on the wonders of Kindergarten orientation, but for now, I just want to wax nostalgic over riding school buses. Here are my most vivid memories:

* Long lines of little girls wearing ankle-length Holly Hobby style dresses and ribbons in their hair, and little boys in stretchy polyester suits, disembarking from hordes of buses outside the Performing Arts Center in preparation to see a play. With a mix of solemnity and silliness only possible in the elementary school years, we in our fanciest clothes (you dressed up for field trips in those days, especially ones to the Theater) felt the importance of the occasion, if only because so did the hundreds of other similarly attired children coming down the steps of their own buses (who had ever seen so many school buses all in one place?!) and into the cavernous, glamorous lobby.

* Sitting all alone, feeling very small and a little disoriented, on the very high-backed school bus seat -- the only child on the entire bus -- and having the driver look at me in his wide rear-view mirror and ask, "Didn't we pass your house yet?" I shook my head no. "Where do you live?" he asked. I gave him my address. "Oh," he said smiling, "you're supposed to be on the first load. Tomorrow afternoon, you get on the bus when they call for the first load children, and we'll drive right to your house. Now, let's get you home. I'll bet your mother is worried." THAT was an understatement. She was frantic. I was her oldest child, riding the bus on my very first day of elementary school, and I had not gotten off the bus with all the other children on my street nearly an hour before. The driver, of course, took me straight to my house and explained everything. To this day I wonder: if every driver did two routes, how were six-year-olds supposed to know whether they should get on the first load or the second load in the afternoons if no one told them which run they were on?

* The hot breeze filtering through the windows as we made our way home from hours of exploring the Etowah Indian Mounds, and wishing that we would get back to school so late in the day that there would be no time for any kind of work at all. Laughing, and eating our snacks, and singing songs, and telling jokes, and that ride taking HOURS (at least). We got our wish. An entire school day devoted to a field trip.

* The adoration my sisters and I felt for our bus driver, Mr. Henson, who knew all of our names, and trusted the oldest kids on the bus to take a head count and be patrols to keep the younger ones in line. Mr. Henson, who smiled when we ran races at the bus stop and did not look the slightest bit annoyed when he had to sit for half a minute while we, with our pounding feet and flying braids, dashed as fast as we could from halfway down the block back to the corner where we were supposed to be waiting for him and not the other way around. Mr Henson, who drove us all a few streets off our normal route one morning, and idled the bus in front of the burnt-out shell of a once-large house, and said to us, "Boys and girls, do you know what happened here? Some children just like you were playing with matches. And their house caught fire. And it burned down, as you can see. This is why you should NEVER play with matches." And then he started the bus up again, and we continued on to school -- horrified and duly impressed about the danger of matches.

* Mr. Henson, whom my middle sister loved so much that she named her pet mouse after him. And when Mr. Henson, the mouse, had several babies a few weeks later, and I insisted that obviously the name must be changed because the mouse was clearly not a boy, my sister said no. "At least change it to Mrs. Henson," I pleaded. "NO," she said. "Her name is Mr. Henson." And thus the mousie's name stayed, all throught the nursing and nurturing of her babies, a small squeaking testament to the loyalty a child may feel for a loving, responsible, friendly, perfect bus driver.

Yesterday, sitting on Mr. Kevin's bus, listening to him say the children, "Now, we talked a lot about how to get on the bus. Let's talk about how to get off. Do you think it's really important to be the first one off the bus, so that you need to push your friends out of the way to get off ahead of them?" "NOOOOOOOO!" the children said in a sustained chorus of understanding.

And I could tell that Mr. Kevin was one of the good ones. A bus driver to love.

And I found myself hoping that, in all the lasting memories my son takes away from his school days, at least a few of them involve the comraderie, independence, and peculiarly unmistakable smell that is riding the bus every day.


* This thought was almost immediately followed by: seriously?!?! It's been 28 years since I was on a school bus? Horrors, I'm OLD!

Dear Costco,

I realize that your milk jugs are more efficient from the standpoint of fitting into a refrigerator, but surely SOMEONE in your design lab must have tried to pour a liquid out of the jug prototypes before giving the thumbs up to rolling out millions of the maddening things.

NO?

Well, let me explain what happens when I -- a perfectly able-bodied, pretty well-educated, experienced mother of two, who has poured A LOT of milk in her day -- go to pour a glass for my children.

The first thing I notice when I pick it up is that the balance feels off. I realize this is probably because I am used to milk jugs that are smaller on the top than on the bottom, while yours is a perfect rectangle. And I realize that a perfect rectangle certainly must store and ship more neatly. But I'll tell you this: as someone who actually likes to POUR her milk, rather than just transport and store it, that rectangle is a problem. It feels top heavy, and it has no pouring spout, and the mouth of it is too big. These three things conspire to force the milk to come out too quickly and in too much volume and too close to the side of the jug.

Frankly, it seems extremely well designed if your aim is to hurl milk in the general direction of a cup.

But as for the fine maneuver of avoiding spills? That is simply impossible with this jug. I don't think I have EVER poured a glass of milk for myself or my children, filled a cereal bowl, added a dab to a coffee, or measured out some milk for a recipe without having to clean the counter afterwards. And sometimes the floor. Occasionally, the splashing fountain of milk ruins an outfit.

It makes me wonder: who designed these jugs anyway? Kittens? They're the only ones I can think of who would benefit from that much spillage.

I get that you want to be environmentally friendly, and, sure, I give you kudos for that. I can read, after all, and I saw that New York Times story about how these jugs save 60-70% of the previous water usage for milk bottling processing, and how the fuel for transport has been reduced by over half, and how three times the gallons can be stored the same cooler space occupied by 1/3 of the old jug style. And darn if I am not impressed with all that energy savings!

But would it have killed you to do all those things with your newfangled packaging and also give just a little bit of thought to how we were going to get the milk out again?

That is, for most of us anyway, the reason we buy the giant jugs in the first place.

With best wishes for speedy improvements to your design team (may the current team members wilt slowly in a shallow puddle of milk),

MommyTime

Idiosyncratic

This post is, as its title suggest, a little jumble of things that are puzzling and delighting me lately. In no particular order, I ponder:

The name of the show "Pinky Dinky Doo." My children love this show. I do, too. What's not to love about a brightly colored cartoon in which the little brother has all manner of (perfectly normal) fears and worries, and his big sister soothes them by making up stories that serve as little allegories for working through anxieties? It's creative, full of "big fancy words," and fun.

And yet, my three-year-old persists in mangling the name of this show. She consistently calls it "Kinky Kanky Doodle." Her brother did the very same thing at this age (when she was a mere infant, so it's not as though she learned this pronunciation from him). I want to know: do TV show developers not test out the names of those shows on little children for purposes of confirming pronunciation? Because while "Pinky Dinky Doo" is a great name, "Kinky Kanky Doodle" sounds a little too much like her big sister who has an unmentionable job.

In other, unrelated, TV news, I have discovered a great new HBO series about a woman detective in Botswana. It's called The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, based on a series of ten novels by Alexander McCall Smith. It's filmed on location, and it is sweet, beautiful, fascinating, well-written, and so many other things. It explores the cultural of being a "lady detective" with humor and strength. I simply love it and never want it to end.

Not such a TV head? Did you know that there is a whole new genre of romance novels out there these days called "Bonnet Novels"? And that they are set in Amish communities and feature chastely intimate (no, that's not an oxymoron), apparently fascinating stories that are selling by the MILLIONS? Members of Amish communities are writing fan mail to authors confessing to sneaking the books (which some communities have banned due to religious differences) under the covers to read at night. But lots of NON-Amish women are loving them too. It's a fascinating world when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can be #7 on the New York Times Bestseller list in the same week that The Secret (an Amish Bonnet novel) can be #19.

And if sports is more your thing, how about this? Sport Stacking. I'm not making this up. It's a huge sport with a worldwide organization. You train for it. You enter matches devoted to it. You have 12 cups and have to stack them into various pre-determined pyramids and back again as fast as you can. How fast? Under six seconds. Doesn't sound that impressive? Take a look at this video and be amazed.



And finally, today I am pondering: what does it mean to be 39? And will I like it? Perhaps I should take up a new sport this year? Do you think I'm too old to start wildly stacking cups?

A Quiz to Start Your Week

What is the relationship between the two photos below, both taken on Sunday?



Is it:

a) When the family isn't paying attention, the dog goes crazy with anything that involves packaging and boxes;

b) While Mama is grading papers, and Daddy is in charge of the children, the older child "mysteriously" slips away from Daddy's notice and wreaks havoc trying to figure out what on earth these little sticky strips wrapped in pink paper are all about, an experiment he feels entitled to undertake because when he asked about the "light sticks" in the next box over, he got a most unsatisfying answer and was not allowed even one to play with;

c) When a girl who doesn't generally need a nap konks out after lunch due to a whole weekend of outdoor activity, she gets so well rested that she has a hard time falling asleep that night; which means she asks to sleep in Mama and Daddy's room; which means she can't sleep in their bed either; which means she looks for something more interesting to do than sleep; which means that since she's already destroyed pretty much all the necklaces in the junk jewelry box that lives on Mama's dresser, she'll explore the next-best thing: funny sticky strips wrapped in pink paper.



(Answer at the end of the post.)

In other fun activities this past weekend, we planted flowers in the porch pots, raked the thatch out of the grass, doused the dandelions with weed killer, tamed the periwinkle, mulched, swept, and generally presentable-ified the yard. (With the exception of our own horrifying presences in it. You'll see in a moment what I mean.)

Also, we continued our losing battle against water in our basement, mustering a box fan, shop vac, and brand-new dehumidifier into the arsenal. Nothing, it appears, can win the fight against a lot that happens to be slightly downhill from our next-door-neighbors', particularly given that their sump pump vents directly into our yard at the perfect slightly-uphill spot.

But really the crowning glory of the weekend was when we got to be That Family. You know, the one that lets their five-year-old run around in the front yard in his Mickey Mouse t-shirt and Transformers underwear and nothing else. The one with the mother who witnesses said child jump onto an old, rusted, very small, used-to-be-red tricycle with one wonky wheel, and vroom down the driveway clenching the handlebars while hunched over the seat and standing on the trike's back.

Barefoot.

Wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underpants.

While riding a rusty, squeaking, wobbly, much-too-small-for-him tricycle down the hill of a concrete driveway.

And when the trike invariably crashed, and he moaned about his sore ankle, the mother of That Family looked up from her raking and said in her tired voice, "This is why I always tell you that you need to wear shoes for riding a bike. And why I've been telling you since you came out here to go inside and put some pants on. If you did those things, you wouldn't get hurt."

To his credit, the child stopped his belly-aching.

To her credit, the mother did not stop her raking.

Unfortunately for our future bank accounts, there were no reality TV producers anywhere in the vicinity to film what was surely the most mortifyingly trashy half-hour in our family's history.


(P.S. The right answer to the little quiz is C -- though it should be noted that Son has in fact voiced resentment on more than one occasion that the "light sticks" are off limits. At least Daughter didn't follow up the festival of package opening by wearing them on herself in any way, right?)

Of Elephants and Verbs

Daughter is at a fascinating moment in her development right now, where she has simultaneously a strong sense of sequences of events and a delightfully flexible notion of the relationship between the past, present and future.

She knows quite clearly, for example, that on the rare occasions when we actually have juice in our fridge, the rule is "first milk, then juice." She knows that after you go potty, you don't pull up your own pants until you shout "Mama! I'm ALL DONE!!" and someone comes to wipe your buns. She knows that after you "plant the flowers with a shovel," you water them, and then they grow.

But for anything that takes more than a few hours to accomplish, time becomes fuzzy. At dinnertime, she is unsure whether she went out onto the playground at school yesterday or this morning. It's a reasonable confusion: there was some sleeping that happened in between the playground time and the pick up time. And, on top of that, she tells me often at bedtime, "I don't want to take a nap," which obviously means she has no idea that she sleeps eleven hours at night and only one or two at school.

She also has no clear concept of things that will happen days away. She knows that when she is "a grown up girl" she will get my "red ring" (a little antique garnet that I have and of which she is enamored). But becoming a grown up is some amorphous event in the future which doesn't require--indeed, perhaps doesn't even allow--quantifying. We are going to New York later this spring, but the trip could be four days or four weeks or four months away and it wouldn't make any difference to her. She knows it won't happen tomorrow, and that it will happen before she's a grown up. Everything in between those two markers is a blur of time for her.

Most endearingly, she has developed a verbal trick that compresses past, future, and her imagination in amazing ways. Yesterday in the car, we were talking about where Daddy was (already at work) and where Mama was going (to grade papers) and what the children would do today at preschool. Daughter sighed knowingly and announced, "When I was a grown-up Daddy, I could go to work too." There is a phenomenal wrinkle in time there; in her past life as a grown man, she might have the possibility of doing something as delightful as going to work.

The collapsing of past and future doesn't only signal her sense of what it means to be an adult. She has said, as we are talking about how elephants' trunks work, "When I was a elephant, I poke my food from my trunk and pick it up to eat it too." And ever since that conversation, she regales us with the occasional tidbit of information about what she used to do back when she was an elephant.

Although you might be tempted to think that she just doesn't know her verb tenses, especially given that she doesn't describe the events of the past in the past tense, I don't think the explanation is that simple. To be sure, she has told us that she was, in another apparent past life, a puppy, and gone on to describe how "I wear a collar." But the way that she describes these events is not as if she is currently doing them, nor as if she is hoping someday to do them, but as if she has already done them, and is simply narrating them. She may not have the verb tense right for describing a past event, but the introduction, "When I was a puppy," seems in her mind to set the stage for that past occurrence, as surely as do her knowing and detailed explanations of what she did back then, even if those explanations are phrased in the present tense. If you ask her if she is a puppy now, she will laugh heartily at you, and say, "Noooo! I'm a little girl."

"But," she will continue, noticing a movement out the window facing our back yard, "when I was a bunny..."

And we're off into another tale.

I'm sure a linguist who studies language acquisition has an explanation that centers on how children learn to delineate the past from the future in terms of language. However, the dreamer in me prefers an explanation that might be concocted by Madeline L'Engle. I love to think that my child is still young enough to imagine possibilities for herself that become so real that she convinces herself she has actually experienced them. She watches pachyderms with such rapt fascination that she can imagine becoming one; she can feel the lengthening of her own nose, intuit the sensation of using it to pick up objects. She can imagine so strongly that she can make real. And then, because she has no clear sense of the distinctions between her past and her future, because any time far away from the present must be all the same time, she is quite sure that she has already done these things she imagines.

It is as if time for her is circular. Her spot on that circle is the now. Her past arcs behind her, her future ahead, and both meet at some point as far away as it is possible to get from her in this moment. She might move forward into the future, but if she goes far enough, more than 180 degrees away from now, she might run into her past. Conversely, if she thinks back far enough into her past, locates herself in experiences that pre-date her three years, she might end up in her own future.

"When I was a big kid," she said yesterday, "I wish I could eat a brownie."

I know that in a short year or two, the grammar of past and future will be solidified in her mind. And a year or so after that, she will have a pretty firm grasp on what it means if some long-anticipated event is an hour or a month away. She will, in all probability, stop telling us stories of when she was a puppy, even if she still plays "pets" with her brother.

A little part of me hopes that doesn't happen too soon. For, truth be told, I am delighted by not just her fancies but by her ability to imagine that when I tell her she can "become anything she wants when she is a grown up," the realm of possibility includes elephants.

It Also Means "having a diseased or run-down appearance"

I used the word scrofulous in an email this morning. Such a great word.

1. Relating to, affected with, or resembling scrofula.
2. Morally degenerate; corrupt: "a scrofulous, grim, darkly funny burlesque on art, celebrity, and love" Stephen Schiff.
(Thanks, Free Dictionary.)

Scrofulous. It just sounds irritated in your mouth when you say it, doesn't it? Scrofulous.

Anyway, I used it not in reference to any individual person but rather to a particular breed of book publishers who print nice clean facsimile copies of nineteenth-century books -- the sorts of books I like to read and to assign, the sorts of books that are hard to come by except through the scanning wonder that is Google books, but who wants to print out an entire book?

You would think that I would have nothing but praise for such publishers, and yet I call them scrofulous. Here's why. In the 19th century, it was quite common for novels to be published in three volumes. People knew that. People planned for that. They paid extra for library subscriptions that would let them take out more than one book at a time, so that they could have the entire three volumes at once and not have to wait for someone else to finish volume III and return it before they could find out how the story ended. Once a book was tremendously popular, sometimes it was reissued in a single-volume format which would be cheaper, largely because you would only have to pay to get one book bound instead of three. Back in those days, when people bought books, they bought the pages inside, and then they took them to their bookbinder of choice to "put between boards" which meant to create the binding and cover. That's why, when you go into libraries in really old houses, all the novels might be bound in the same red leather covers. Not because the publisher necessarily issued them that way, but because that's the cover the owner chose to have put onto all of his books.

Anyway, back to scrofula. These "great" reprint publishers who are resurrecting long-out-of-print books today? Are touting them as "new" and as "facsimiles" and all things good. Only when you order the book from Amazon, let's say, for the not cheap price of $19.99, it arrives, and you find that it in fact contains ONLY VOLUME II of the original. Seriously. Only the middle volume. As if anyone in her right mind would be excited to start reading a book a third of the way through, try to figure out what's been happening up to that point, and then stop before the end. For $19.99!!

Not only that, but the cover of the book isn't marked to say "Volume II," and the book description doesn't say, "buy 1/3 of this great book from us and have hours of extra-added fun trying to guess what happens before and after the part we're willing to send you." Nor do they also publish volumes I and II separately.

If that's not scrofulosity, I don't know what is.

(Amazon, I must say, has been awesome, and is taking the book back, no questions asked, and even is willing to refund shipping.)

Do these publishers think we won't notice? That a book that starts on "Chapter 12" won't raise any suspicions? That it's just "old" stuff anyway and that no one really cares about that stuff enough to be bothered?

Or are they just stupid? Did they just grab books from Google books without paying much attention to what they were then reprinting? The books there often turn out to be only one volume of a multi-volume set because the good folks at Google are scanning each individual volume as a separate file, and many single novels in the now-out-of-copyright centuries were multi-volume affairs. But I KNOW that about old books, and I can read the cover sheet on Google to know that I'm only getting one volume. Apparently, these book publishers can't. Or think I can't.

Either way, I call that scrofulous. How do you sell a "new" book without disclosing that it's actually only 1/3 of a book?

I'll be these folks even look morally contaminated. I hear scrofula is a nasty disease. That kind of moral turpitude must show up in your face after a while, don't you think? Unless it's the Dorian Gray publishing company. In which case, I'm betting that they never read the last few chapters of that novel to know that, eventually, that immoral stuff you do all comes back to haunt you.

Honestly. Selling the middle 1/3 of a book as if it were the whole thing. What will they think of next?

Seeing Balance

You know what they say about the weather in Michigan?
If you don't like it, wait ten minutes.

Yesterday it was 75 degrees and sunny here. We went to the playground, took an indoor hiatus long enough to go to a birthday party, came home and put on swim shirts, shorts, hats and sunscreen and filled up the kiddie pool in the backyard to play sailboats and torpedoes. Then we drew sidewalk chalk all over the back deck. I only wish I'd taken a photo of my two plus their little friend, on their hands and knees with sponges, scrubbing the deck. They were actually having a grand time erasing their chalk drawing to start over again, but it certainly looked like Cinderella, the Swimwear Edition. Then we played baseball for a while. In between it all, we swung on the horsey tire swing, slid down the slide 857 times, and played chase. Finally, we had to take showers and a play-doh break indoors before going back outside for a cook-out with friends. It was a glorious springtime day, boding delicious things for summer.

Today it was 53 and raining.

So we made indoor fun instead -- which has its own charms too.

As soon as I snapped the photo above, Son asked, "Are you going to send that to Daddy, so that he can see what we're doing too?" So, of course, I did.

Then we ate brownies for dinner at 5:00.

We followed it up with piles of fresh fruit and veggies with dip at 6:30, but the kids thought of that as a "snack," so I'm pretty sure I still am going to get credit for doing the coolest mom thing EVER while Daddy was away by letting them eat brownies for dinner.

Here's what I have learned in the last three days of flying solo with my two: having children is waaaaay more fun if you don't try to do anything else at all except BE while you are with them. I didn't grade anything, or email anything, or read anything, or blog, or take any work phone calls, while we were together. I didn't try to do any laundry (I'd done it all on Thursday, while Daddy was still in town) or scrub any bathrooms or clean any fishtanks. My house cleaning was limited to daily dishes and a quick mop of the kitchen floor tonight, plus enforcing our family standard "you have to clean up your puzzle messes before you can pull out the play doh." Beyond that, I played, went swimming, took them out to lunch, played some more, read loads of stories, and snuggled them on the couch to watch "Max and Ruby." Discipline was extremely easy (presumably because they had as much attention from me as they could possibly want and therefore had little to throw a tantrum about).

There are many ways in which I don't envy full-time stay-at-home mothers. I don't think I have the stamina to do what they do. You may think that I've just done it for the last three days. But in our house, the last three days were basically like vacation, not like daily routine -- and were I doing the at-home daily routine with children 24/7, I think I would become certifiable due to lack of adult interaction and an overwhelming urge to burn Mount Laundry.

But I will say this: as someone who is used to trying to squeeze and snatch a spare moment here and a stray half-hour there to get work done, I found it blissfully freeing to choose to focus on just one thing and forget about everything else. I know it can be emotionally draining to be with children all the time. But it can also be emotionally exhausting to be pulled in two directions all the time. And it sure was nice to tread around in the greener grass on the other side of the fence for a few days.

Delightful, actually.

I have made a vow to myself to remember this and to try to be better about keeping my two halves more separate. That might sound counter-intuitive, bifurcated, more likely to result in a feeling of being constantly torn. But here is what I think for me instead: my job-work is never done. And because it is never done, I need to find a better way to compartmentalize it so that my child-work can be more joyful.

Unlike a 9-5 job (or an 8-8 job, or whatever), teaching takes as much time as you give it. If you have four hours to grade that stack of papers, it will take four hours. If you only have two-and-a-half, you will get them done in that time. But--and this is the key--the work is largely work that can (and often should) be done outside of an office environment. Students send you emails at all hours and on the weekends, and they expect you to respond within 24 hours. (Actually, they secretly hope that you are also awake at 3am and awaiting the "ding" of their email's arrival, so that you will answer it immediately, but if you are good at your job, you have told them on day 1 in no uncertain terms not to hold their breaths on that score.) Your office is typically a tiny windowless room in a building built in 1964, furnished with green Steelcase gems of the same era. The air quality is bad, the view (of cinderblocks) uninspiring, and the resources next to useless (apart from high-speed internet, you have no archives, no fridge, no library, and no comfy reading chair there). So you work outside of the office. And, at all times, you could do your work almost any time of day or night.

Which means that at almost every time of day or night, you feel as if you OUGHT to be working instead of doing something else.

This is particularly the case for researching and publishing. The article that you just finished? It may be "done," but there will be readers' comments and revisions, communications, and more reading, rewrites and proofs to go over, before it's actually published. The process of researching, writing, and publishing is so drawn-out that there is no sense that anything is ever really finished. By the time something emerges in print, it's completely anti-climactic because it's been so long out of your hands and in production that you've moved on to the next project, which is currently still in process. Colleagues photocopy you reviews of books that sound fascinating and that you can't wait to read. Conferences get announced that are right up your alley -- and so you have to put together a paper to propose for them. And so on. The job is a process more than it is a series of end products, and so, it always feels as if there is more to do.

For me, this often translates into a nagging feeling that I "have to do just one more thing" before I can really play with my children. Or a guilt that I am not doing right by my students if I defer returning their papers for one more class period because I spent too much time in the swimming pool on Saturday.

But what I reminded myself this weekend is: THIS IS THE WEEKEND. I'm not supposed to have to work every single day. I'm supposed to have a day or two here or there when I get to play. And so I did.

It is a difficult balance I have to find. I do need to juggle evenings and occasional weekends of work because I have made the choice to spend two week days at home with my little ones rather than put them into fulltime daycare. The flexibility of my schedule, and the fact that the majority of my work is not bound to particular places (with the obvious exception of classroom teaching and meetings), means I can do that. But it also means that I have to find another fifteen hours per week in which to work.

Even so, after realizing tonight with a shock, as I was reading to the kids, that I am not exhausted by this weekend of managing them alone, but instead rejuvenated by it, it occurs to me that surely I can come up with wiser ways to get the rest of my work done without sacrificing the joyful half of my brain when I am actually with Son and Daughter.

I need to create a moratorium zone: work here, family there, and never the twain shall meet.

In all practicality, I will of course have to have some weekends where Husband takes the kids to the pool so I can finish some grading. But I really think that if I manage my evenings better, my days can be better too. I will have to come back from La La Land and actually do laundry and errands with my children in tow. I will have to scrub things, or pay bills. I will have to referee squabbles. But if a part of me isn't thinking, "just stop shouting at each other so Mommy can answer a few more emails," I think perhaps I will be more patient, and better able to help them sort it out.

Also, I will be happier.

And as everyone knows: when Mama is happy, it's so much easier for everyone to be happy.

When the cat's aways, the mice will...

play musical beds?

Husband is out of town this weekend. Last night, Daughter went to bed without a screaming and crying fit (more on that miraculous occurrence in another post). Son, on the other hand, sobbed into his pillow missing his daddy. Even so, they were both quiet in their beds at 7:25. Then, of course, ten minutes later, Son was downstairs to go potty. Then down again because he couldn't sleep. Then down again because he still couldn't sleep. I suggested that he sleep upside down. (He has convinced himself that if he puts the pillow at the bottom of the bed, it is a magic talisman that will help him sleeps. Because he thinks it will work, it does work.) But tonight? "I don't want to do that," he sad mournfully. Whereupon I told him that if he wanted to fall asleep in our bed, that would be fine.

"That's just what I wanted," he replied happily, and practically skipped up the stairs to do just that. I didn't hear from him again.

Falling asleep in Mama and Daddy's bed is a prize reserved for special occasions of insomnia. Both of our kids take advantage of this prize once in a while. Then, when we grown ups come to bed, we carry the heavy sleepers back to their own beds for the rest of the night, and all is well. Hard core, they-must-learn-to-sleep-in-their-own-bed folks may sneer at this plan, but it seems to comfort the little ones when they are sick or, as in this case, missing their Daddy. So I'm fine with it.

Last night, when I came to bed, I found this.

Son sleeping face down with Teddy, his arms tucked under himself for added warmth (all the many blankets and covers were on the floor), and Dog smooshed up as close to Son as she could get. She lifted her head sharply when I came in, as if to say, "Don't you wake my sleeping boy, Lady."

I decided that since Husband wasn't going to be using his side of the bed, they might as well stay. But I did do a little rearranging in the form of adding appropriate use of pillows. And myself. (I did also add covers, but the limits of my astonishing art skills preclude me drawing covers while still enabling you to see the layout of all the figures in the bed.)

Cozy and sweet, right? A nice way for a me to feel not so lonely in my giant extra-wide queen-sized bed while my husband is away.

What I forgot, however, is that children multiply in the night.

And grow.

And dogs steal covers.

And the net result, in the wee hours of the morning, is something like this:

where the children have grown to occupy twice their normal area, flailing across tremendous square feet of bed space in the reckless abandon of REM sleep. The dog, though still curled up, has turned into a 75 pound stiff lump of fur-covered concrete. Although she is not actually using a pillow, she is precluding any human from using an entire half of the bed by strategically placing her immovable bulk smack dab in the center of prime bedtime real estate. Have you ever tried to shift a sleeping 75-pound dog who does not want to be moved? You might as well try to carry your car across the room. I was relegated to sleeping awkwardly across the foot of my own bed, with no pillow and almost no covers, squished into the few square inches left to me by my precious family. I felt like an interloper trying to squeeze myself in, like a child sneaking into her parents' bed at night. (But obviously, not like my own children, who feel perfectly confident in their own primacy that they are quite comfortable growing over five feet tall at night in my bed.)

Absurd? Yes.

Will it probably happen again tonight since Husband is still away? Yes.

And I'm not sure I'd want it any other way.

Though I may take some precautions tonight and store a spare pillow at the foot of the bed for myself.

Mood Enhancers

Let's say a colleague writes you a nasty email, complete with ugly, unjustified insinuations about your incompetence, and cc's your boss...

Or your body, for reasons you cannot explain, has felt so bone-numbingly tired for the past week that you can only liken yourself to a shapeless towel that's been wrung out by an old-fashioned mangle and left in a heap...

Or your three-year-old decides that rather than play along with the "It's Bedtime Now" game of an evening, she would rather train for the Shrieking Olympics in the High-Decibel Marathon event (which she will certainly win, hands down)...

Or your sump pump stops working, your basement floods with nearly two inches of water, and your dehumidifier chooses that particular week to say Sayonara and jet off to whatever constitutes "greener pastures" for a short, dull, rectangular appliance...

Or your students just will keep writing papers that you have to grade in a hurry and yet with good intentions and constructive feedback (papers which you have assigned, obviously, and for whose presence on your desk you have absolutely no one to blame but yourself)...

Or you have something else going on that is frustrating, annoying, exasperating, irritating, or otherwise malevolent...

...may I suggest the following remedies?

Take your pristine, white, never seen the outside of the gym due to the 297-month-long winter you've just lived through, OUTSIDE on a sunny day for a little jaunt.


Admire the view.


Snuggle with the dog on a sunny stoop after a lilting walk.


Imagine the fairies who would relish drinking these jewel-sized droplets of dew from such perfect little cups.


Remember that the world is so much bigger and brighter than petty people or the momentary inconvenience of faulty electronics, and that even gold-medal winners age out of perfection in their sports.

Or at least have their "off" days where the sport in question is furthest from their minds.

A Stitch in Time

When I was very young -- probably between about four and six years old -- my mother had a cabinet-mounted sewing machine that had a place in our wide upper hallway. It sat in front of a window, so she could look out on the hilly front yard while sewing. I have a lot of vivid memories associated with those eight square feet of my childhood house.

The drawers of the cabinet had a peculiar smell. Not incense or soap or spices or pot pourri or any other single thing meant to lend fragrance. It was a scent that seemed to be part of the wood itself -- a little spicy, a touch earthy, mixed with the fainter hints of warm cotton thread and new zippers. I used to love to explore the pleasant jumble of buttons and spools, sewing machine feet and scissors, measuring tapes and pins, relishing the smell, feeling the gloss of a button or the stud of a tiny metal snap beneath my finger.

There was a giant old milk can--of the sort used in the 19th century to transport milk in bulk by train from farm to city--that sat in the hallway corner, filled with scraps of fabric left over from various projects. Remnants large enough to make something new were kept in the linen closet. The can was reserved for tiny bits. A border of blue, a random polygon of white sprigged with rosebuds, a bit of ruffle leftover from trimming a green dotted-swiss curtain. The inside of this can had its own particular smell too -- a mix of metal and wool, cotton and the memory of milk. Plunging my arms into the dark depths of the scrap can, there was no telling what I would find, though there was some guarantee that whatever it was would be a treasure on the perfect scale for making a new skirt for a doll.

My strongest memory, though, of this sunny length of hallway is "helping" my mother sew. I used to sit behind her on her chair, my legs draped on either side of her body, dangling. I couldn't see what she was doing, but I could pretend that I was sewing too. Pressed against the warm of her back, I participated in the creative process the best way I knew how.

Today, as I was sewing patches into more of Son's pant knees, Daughter wandered into the room, climbed up into my chair, and positioned herself behind me. "Please don't jiggle Mama while she's sewing," I said, perhaps a little too strongly, "I have a dangerous needle here, and someone could get hurt."

She peered over my shoulder, nodding knowingly, and pointing at the pin cushion attached to the side of the sewing machine, "Yots and yots of dang'rous needles," she confirmed.

"Please sit down," I insisted. (My chair is a swiveling office chair, nicely cushioned, but susceptible to her every movement, especially when I have only one foot to anchor it still and the other is occupied with the machine's foot pedal.)

"But," she said, matter-of-factly, "then I can't see."

And immediately, I was three years old myself. Sitting behind my own mother, vicariously sewing a garment I could neither touch nor see.

I realize as I write this that Daughter, too, loves to rifle through the drawers of my sewing machine cabinet -- the very same cabinet that was once my mother's. She plays with the buttons, identifies the thread colors, runs her chubby fingers over the silky ribbons. She demands to know what a button-hole foot is for. She knows that the top drawer is off-limits, filled as it is with all the "dang'rous" things.

As I sew, Daughter peers at the running machine, fascinated and appropriately a little afraid of its noise and speed. I can feel her hands working at my back. It is distracting, a little annoying, to be frank, because it makes me wiggly and hampers my work.

But is is also tremendously sweet. My daughter, like my son, has the family drive to create. But where he is all about the art supplies, she seems to gravitate to the tactile, the three dimensional. The smells and sounds and possibilities that exist in a pile of fabric and a sewing machine may be difficult to imagine for an adult who does not sew. But to a child, they are magical.

It's nice to be reminded to recognize the inspiration from time to time.

Lego Jesus

On Easter Sunday, a Catholic church in Sweden opened its mass by unveiling a life-size Lego statue of Jesus. It took nearly 30,000 legos to make the statue -- legos that were donated by the congregation. I know Sweden is the home of legos and all, but I have to wonder if a lot of little kids went home from church to nothing to play with, since all their legos were in the statue.

On the other hand, it looks pretty amazing.

On the third hand: lego Jesus? Seriously? Am I the only one who finds this more than a little strange?

Photo credit.

Riddle Me This

What, precisely, are five-year-old boy knees made of?

(Hint: skin, bones, and cartilage is the wrong answer.)

I can't say for sure, myself. But this I do know: from almost exactly the moment he turned five, Son has been busting through the knees of his pants legs as if his pants were made of butter and his knees were hot knives. Seriously, the rate of decay of brand-new blue jean knees is something deserving of a Guinness world record -- if only I knew whom to call to show this off.

In the past few months, I have patched blue jeans and heavy cotton twill pants. Multiply. Carefully. Using heavy denim patches, and numerous rows of stitching. Yesterday I noticed that even the most recent patches are disintegrating. If I didn't know better, I might think his knees are actually radioactive.

Just this morning, I found the beginnings of a hole -- a threadbare patch in which only the horizontal fibers were remaining -- in a pair of canvas army pants. These particular pants even have gussets in the knees (you know, those seams stitched halfway across the knee region, to make the knee a tiny bit baggy), which in theory would be just the thing to combat Pointy Knee Syndrome. And yet, they too are failing.

Yesterday, he tore a horizontal slash across the knee of a favored pair of corduroys.

There seem to be no pants immune to the scourge of the razor sharp knees of this child.

Here's what else I don't understand. Daughter has blue jeans that she inherited from Son, some of which he had inherited from the older sons of our good friends. THOSE four-children-later blue jeans are still intact. I can't figure it out. It's not clear to me that my two children play that differently. There seems to be something particular that happens on a fifth birthday that makes the difference, though, since his knees did not have this particular sword-like property when he was younger.

Hence, I am at the point of hiding the one pair of inky dark blue jeans Son has that don't yet look like Swiss cheese, just so he can have one intact pair of pants to take with us on our trip to New York. We're not leaving for a month, and it seems a shame to waste a whole month of chilly weather without letting him wear these presentable jeans. But I cannot bear to buy another pair of blue jeans before we leave, and it is absolutely certain that if these pants go into the rotation, they will not last a month in a contest with those particular knees.

The knees always win.

So here's what I want to know: is there anything I can use for these patches that will make a difference? Should I be lining his pants legs in lead? Will he outgrow this?

And, the $64,000 question: once we get into shorts weather, and whatever is forming the abrasive force on the other side of his pants legs is going head-to-head with his knees, will his knees finally lose? Is my choice knee patches or ER visits?

Tokens of Spring

Baking a cake this morning for Daughter's upcoming birthday party, I was suddenly reminded of a particular springtime picnic undertaken when I was still in high school. My best friend since forever came over to my house, and together we fried chicken, made a giant chocolate layer cake from scratch, complete with homemade chocolate icing, bottled up lemonade, packed plates and silverware and strawberries and napkins and a giant blanket on which to sit.

It must have taken us three or four solid hours to prepare that picnic. And it was picnic perfection.

We went out the the Emory President's Park -- 50-odd acres of rolling hills, groomed grass, a pond, a decrepit stone "Rapunzel" tower, and giant shade trees. We trekked in (no motor vehicles allowed), carrying our stores, and spread out on the sunny side of a hill. We spent the whole afternoon nibbling slowly, talking incessantly, moving our blanket periodically as the lengthening shadows of giant oaks threatened to throw us into a chill. Foot by foot, we kept our blanket in the weak early sun, boldly exposing our winter-pale legs in shorts, timidly wrapping our upper bodies in the long-sleeved shirts we were grateful to have brought.

I have some dim idea that probably her two younger sisters and my two ditto were also there. Clearly, she and I could not eat an entire layer cake alone, even at sixteen, when we were astonishingly capable of packing away vast quantities of food belied by our rail-thin selves, so I am quite sure we must have had help. But in my memory, it is just her and me. The two of us, laughing, eating, relishing the springtime and our friendship.

Nearly every time I make this chocolate cake (the recipe on the back of the Hershey's cocoa tin, if you are curious), I think of that day, the day that forever established in my mind that the only "correct" foods for a picnic were homemade fried chicken and chocolate cake, with lemonade to drink. Now, more than 20 years later, those foods for me are the picnic ideal.

Looking around my neighborhood right now, I have picnics on the brain, as we are just getting the hint of springtime in the air. The crocus, brave enough poke up through the snow before it is all gone, are blooming, and the daffodils are still at least a week or two away. But the weeping willows, ah! First trees to cloak themselves in a mist of green each year, their long hair-like tendrils are covered now in pale, celery colored buds. From afar, the buds of each narrow leaf do not resemble what they will become; they are merely the promise of leaves, as if someone took a winter charcoal drawing of a tree, and gave it a light water-color wash of green. But I know what it means: springtime and flowers are around the corner. Picnics are not far off.

In celebration, I made a little garden of cupcakes today.


And while there is as yet too much chill in the air to sit on the still-thawing ground to eat a meal, I am sure that tonight, I will dream of picnics.

Wherever you are, I hope your spring has sprung too.

IFOs: Even More Fun Than UFOs!

What's an IFO? you ask. Why, it's an Inappropriate Flying Object.

For your edification, may I present the following list of IFO categories.

FIFOs (Food IFOs): generally found at the dinner table, these may take the form of any round item (such as small green peas), detested foods that the eater would prefer were not on his plate, or missiles surreptitiously aimed at the dog.

BIIFOs (Boredom Induced IFOs): larger objects thrown across rooms in a fit of desperation trying to come up with a new game. These flying objects are generally unweildy, and, thanks to the laws of Dumb Luck, their first assay through space typically results in no one getting beaned. Their initial flights are accompanied by an invitation, such as "Hey! Wanna' play couch fight?!" (while the couch-cushion is airborne, obviously)

PIIFOs (Pique Induced IFOs): medium-sized, potentially long-range objects, hurled aggressive through space in the specific direction of another human. These might include tennis balls, game pieces, small books, or anything else particularly desireable that the bearer does not want to share or that the offender "doesn't understand how to play with right." Only in your dreams do they include objects made by Nerf, since one of the primary qualities of PIIFOs is the exciting risk of real danger they pose, should anyone catch one in the eye.

GIFOs (Gifted IFOs): presents given to your children by well-meaning but clueless relatives who don't register that there are some toys better kept out of the hands of preschoolers, and who therefore think that home-made rocket kits, real baseballs, delicate model helicopters, and other similar paraphernalia simply sound FUN! For Kids of All Ages!

There is also an important sub-genre of GIFO that all parents (and well-meaning purhcases of presents for other people's children) would do well to register: the LIFO.

That's right. The Lewd IFO. Perhaps the following pictures will speak for themselves.

In transport mode:


Ready for blast-off:

Need I say that this is one of Son's favorite birthday presents of all time? And that it makes me cringe and snort uncontrollably every time he pulls it out?

This is, in case you can't tell, a stomping rocket. You hook the tube up to a rock-shaped bladder, and then you stomp on the rock, and the rocket ejects from the transporter and flies into the air. Seriously. Toy designers need to get a grip. It's not bad enough that they design a toy that a child will peer over, then stomp to launch, quite possibly right into his own face? They also have to design it so that it overtly looks like a launching part of said child's anatomy?

This was a present from my sister, and in her defense, the box did made the whole thing look very cool. But also, in her defense, she only has three daughters, so I don't think she is completely attune to the level of anatomical rocket jokes possible in a household with a five-year-old boy.

Hence I present this as a little PSA for anyone out there who may be purchasing a gift for a boy birthday anytime soon: be sure, if you purchase a LIFO, that you are giving it to a child whose mother has the sense of humor of a an eleven-year-old boy.

Personally, my favorite part of this whole toy is the little green alien that flies in the tip of the rocket. Heh heh.

Can You Write My Segues for Me? Please?

My brain is very very tired today, thanks to the shenanigans of Daughter, who choose midnight to 3am as optimal play time / throwing a fit time / snuggle with mama in the bed time / sit in the middle of the floor and whine time. So here's what passing for interesting in my current frame of mind.

Michigan State is in the NCAA basketball finals tonight, which are being held in downtown Detroit. And I am pretty sure that whether during the regular season you are a Michigan or Michigan State fan around here, right now you're rooting for the underdogs in green-and-white to win. Detroit needs this. Michigan needs this. It would be a much-needed bright spot at the end of what has been an incredibly bleak winter.

Just in time to remind us of that fact, we're having a snow squall today. Depending on where you look, predictions range all the way up to 8" of the white stuff. It's kind of funny, in that perverse midwestern weather sort of way. It's also a little tiresome. We've had enough of winter this year. Bring on the spring.

In other, unrelated news, our bank has changed its ATM to something that looks like the command console of a space ship. It's so incredibly high tech that it's disconcerting. If you want to make a deposit, it tells you to insert the checks without an envelope. It took me a few minutes to work up the guts for that. When I finally tried it, the machine spit them all back at me -- and only then did I realize that I was supposed to insert them one at a time. So I inserted the first one. Jiminy Crickets! It scanned the thing, told me what it thought the deposit amount was based on that scan (it was right), and then before I hit the button to "approve" that deposit amount, it actually showed me a copy of the check on the screen, so that it could ensure that I and the machine were on the same page about this deposit. If I'd been the type to issue forth with low whistles of admiration, that would have been the moment to do so.

Of course, such gagetry comes with a price. And the price in this case is that you have to insert the checks one at a time and go through the painfully slow process of seeing and approving each one individually, and then going through about four more clicks just to get back to the screen where you can deposit the next check. So the whole thing takes about five times longer than making a deposit used to. But then you can get a space-age deposit receipt that actually includes check images, which is pretty cool.

And, when you withdraw money, it makes you take your card back BEFORE dispensing the cash, so that the next yoyo who comes along can't snag the card that you absent-mindedly left hanging in the breeze, half in and half out of the card slot. Now that is an innovation I can support. Not that I've ever left my card behind because once I got my cash, I was done with the bank machine, you understand. But I'm pretty tired these days. And it's not helped by hearing 275 rounds of "You are My Sunshine" coming from my daughter's musical rabbit at 2am.

I'm sure there's some kind of clever conclusion I should be able to make here -- drawing together sleeplessness, the swirling snowstorm, the irony of songs about sunshine, and the value of prescient bank machines, but my brain seems incapable of writing those clever sentences. So if you wouldn't mind, please just assume there is a connection. Then chuckle at the irony or humor or whatever it is. And root for State tonight.

Oh, and please send coffee.

Springtime, Michgan Style

They tell me that we should gird our loins for snow again soon. I am sighing, but I'm not surprised. This is just what it means to live in Michigan in April.

So, today being promised as the only "nice" day for a while, we did what any reasonable (read: cabin feverish, over-energetic) family of four would do: we went to the playground.

The children were delighted that we didn't have to wear coats. "No COATS!" they sang out as they got ready. Here is what "no coats" looks like to a Michigan child.


(In case you live in a sunnier clime, windbreakers are NOTHING like coats; coats are giant puffy concoctions that hamper your movements.)

And here is the joy of springtime:


Happy Saturday!

Enter an Aging Lady, Hobbling

Aching knees used to be a surefire sign that it was time to buy new running shoes. Now, they're just a sign that it's Wednesday.

Time was, I could get my body to do pretty much anything I wanted it to do. Sure, I would have to practice, train it, learn the skills -- and I'm not saying that was necessarily a picnic. But if I decided to take up rock climbing on a whim (the whim's name was Julian, or it should have been, and he was the tall dark and handsomest boy-man who'd ever asked me out, and he was a pretty serious climber who was willing to teach me in exchange for sewing lessons because he really wanted to learn to sew and then to make himself a jump suit, as in a suit for jumping out of planes with a parachute strapped on -- so obviously, I WAS going to learn to climb, and I WAS going to kiss him somewhere between all those lessons)...anyway, if I decided to take up rock climbing on a whim, I could figure out the basics pretty quickly and, over the course of a summer, become quite respectable at it. Not great, mind you. But strong enough, flexible enough, and with enough technique to finish climbs that weren't just little beginner ones and wouldn't embarrass me in front of anyone who could really climb. If I took up rock climbing, I could, in the space of three months, gain five pounds of muscle weight and lose a whole clothing size and become pretty buff and be able to do ten pull ups unassisted.

Or, if I preferred, I could run. I could be a research-paper-writing, peanut-m-&-m-by-the-pound-eating, over-extended graduate student all winter, and then, come April 1 when I got an invitation to a wedding to take place on the beach in Mobile, AL over Memorial Day, resolve to look great in a bikini by then, and easily enough trot my way back into bathing suit shape. I wouldn't have to do anything too crazy, either. Just strap on the shoes every other day, and take off. I could manage 30 minutes of running with four one-minute walking breaks tucked in there on day one. And by about two weeks in, I would be able to run those 30 minutes without stopping. And by week eight, I'd be up to four miles in 35 minutes. And then I'd trot to the store and buy sunscreen, and pack for a wedding where I didn't know anyone, and have a fabulous time spending the entire weekend in either a bathing suit or a fancy dress, and meet a new fabulous boy-man, this time one who was training to be a neurosurgeon.

I do not say these things to brag but rather as a benchmark for reflection.

I jumped into a similar kind of goal not too long ago. This time there was no boy-man involved (I've pretty much lassoed the one I'm planning on sticking with). It's just me, myself, my winter body, and my sights set on completing a local 10K with some friends on Father's Day. I've been slowly working my way up in distance, carefully creeping up the pace on the treadmill, which is the best place to run during a long Michigan winter. I hit four miles on Tuesday and I managed them in 35:44. I felt great, flying along with a nice little kick at the end of the run, putting on that burst of speed with the fast-paced song that finishes my running mix. I stretched, sat in the steam room for a few minutes, showered, and went about my day.

But here's the thing: on Wednesday, my knees were achy. And then I realized that last week, my knees were achy after my "long" Tuesday run too. (Fridays we do speed work, Tuesdays we work on adding distance). And the week before that, they were so achy that I actually took a glucosamine tablet, which is the stuff that naturally lubricates your joints when you're young, and that you can buy in giant bottles at Costco when you have an aging arthritic dog who needs something to make her hips feel better, and oh my heavens, I actually just took aging-joint medication without even thinking twice about it!

It used to be the case that I would adore a pair of new running shoes until the day I was clattering down the steps in my apartment building and realized that there were little twinges in my knees. And then I would pause, do some calculations, figure out that I'd probably surpassed the recommended 500-mile life limit for the cushioning in running shoes, and I'd go buy a new pair. Voila! Problem solved. No more aching knees.

But now, I'm running on shoes that I've had for less than six months, during much of which I was swimming rather than running, which means they have less than 200 miles on them.

The only conclusion I can come to is that my knees don't ache because my shoes are getting old. They ache because my knees are getting old.

I see other signs of this aging too. My body is not as responsive as it used to be. It takes me longer to work my way up to a distance and running pace that used to be "easy." Sprains take more time to heal. The extra weight in my thighs, the small poof on what used to be my very flat stomach...these things are more resistant to budging. My running is finally getting to the point where I want it to be, but my body has not reshaped itself the way it once would have by the time I reached this point.

In short, I am no longer 25.

This, of course, is no great revelation. I haven't been 25 for a long time. But I have gotten used to being able to set a goal for myself, tell my body, "make it so," and have it happen. Now, I feel a little unsure. I know that I will be able to run 6.2 miles before June comes. But what I no longer am confident about is my comfort level along the way. I am not used to inhabiting a body that reminds me almost daily that I am pushing it. I am not used to walking on legs that talk back.

It used to be the case that every spring, I went through a sort of crash course in running, where I had to remind my limbs and heart what this was all about -- but it also used to be the case that after that first two or three weeks, my body and I would be in synch, happy to stretch and push, grateful for the bright elasticity of a sunny day and the wind off the lake. Now, my body is beginning to sound a bit grumpy, crackling ominously with no provocation, aching in between runs, sending twinges to my knees as I walk up the stairs to tuck in my children, reminding me constantly that I am pushing it.

I have tried to be very careful about not increasing my distance or pace too quickly, followed all the rules of running safely after a hiatus. As I have paced my breathing and plotted out my distances and times, I have been doing so according to the rules that worked for my 25-year-old self. Those rules, discovered when I first began to take running seriously, worked for me for over a decade. Now, it seems I need to modify them to take into account the fact that my body has suddenly aged.

It may not seem to make sense, but I feel right now that I have been working, exercising, loving, running, and living in a body that was ageless, and that suddenly, nearly over night, time has caught up with it. My body was in its early-20s prime for 15-odd years. Now, quite suddenly, it is 38. No warning, no slow decline. Or at least, none that was perceptible. Perhaps, had I not been so busy being pregnant, nursing babies, working at a career, stripping wallpaper, planting gardens -- making a life and a home and a family -- I would have noticed subtle signs along the way. But instead, I feel blindsided. Hit out of the blue with the fact that my physical self no longer matches up to the abilities I imagine it to have. It is as if I have been living with an idealized image of my body's capacity, and someone has abruptly shown me that ideals are not reality.

I am sure I can work with this body. It has stamina. It has borne children strongly and well. It has soft places on which they can lie their heads in the middle of the night when they cannot sleep. It can carry their increasing weights back to bed, or across a parking lot, or out of danger. It can still rally in the morning despite being kept awake too late at night.

I can work with this body, although I will have to rethink the rules for doing so.

And yet I still hope that, if I work with it a bit more gently, it can also run as far as I want it to go.